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Monday, July 22, 2013

Ready For Personalized "Business Interactions" With
Mobile UC?

As all forms of person-to-person and process-to person contacts
converge under BYOD for multi-modal, mobile devices to accommodate the
different needs of individual end users, it is getting more difficult to quantify
business communications infrastructure requirements for any organization. That
is why there is such a big interest in migrating to “cloud”-based, hosted and
managed services, rather than investing in new premise-based telephony systems
that is based on the wired PSTN. This is, however, an evolutionary transition
for most organizations that have existing legacy PBX and desktop technologies
that still work.

The UC Strategies Experts were headed in the right direction when they
defined “unified communications” (UC) as “communications integrated to
optimize business processes.” That is a fundamental perspective way of the
technology for making both person-to-person and process-to-person communication
applications more inter-operable and integrated. However, “UC” doesn’t describe
what has become even more important to the adoption of technology, i.e., the
different user interfaces and modalities for flexibly and seamlessly exploiting
all forms of contact and interaction between both people and with automated
applications.

“Use Cases” Correlate Business Processes
With Specific Types of Involved End Users

Most
importantly, it has now become more difficult for organizations to quantify
their operational interaction/communication needs (functionality, network capacities,
etc.) for their many different end users, both inside and outside the
organization. That includes business partners and consumers/customers, as well
as different types of employees in an organization. However, the flexibility of
private or public network (“cloud”) solutions can help the selective transition
of an organization’s existing business communications to the next generation of
what I have started to call “business interactions.”
Communications flexibility is not just for a particular business process, e.g.,
often referred to as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), but must
also include the personalized contact and interaction needs between different
individual end users involved with that specific process.

One way
to plan for that perspective of more flexible and interoperable “business
interactions,” is to recognize that most business organizations in major
vertical industries have similar business processes that need to integrate with
communication applications on a personalized end user basis. That is where BYOD
and interaction flexibility comes into play, i.e., each type of end user
involved in a key business process needs to be identified in terms of their job
responsibilities or “roles”, as well as for the communication facilities that
they will utilize. That will also include “customer” roles of consumers, who
are part of a business process. This will be the new way that business
interaction requirements will have to be defined in order to implement
communication flexibility efficiencies for “optimized”
business processes.

Start With A “Use Case” Business Process
For Its Interaction Needs

While the
technology is still developing the new tools for business interactions and
marketing is looking for the right term to describe how both end users and
automated business process applications will dynamically interact, business
organizations of all sizes should start reviewing “who does what” in their high
priority business activities. This perspective must now include mobile end
users, who will also be more multi-modal and flexible, when it comes to
business interactions.

In
addition to making and responding to contacts, end users involved in a business
process will also need access to contextual information that is always part of
a business interaction with both people and automated applications. Finally,
start planning on IP-based “click-to-contact” people for all involved end
users, using federated presence information for calls or IM to gradually
replace legacy phone calls over the PSTN. That’s where telephony is going and
the migration is starting now in the "clouds!"